For women’s study courses, this look at a heretofore largely unexplored phenomenon is sure to provide controversial material.
Fifteen instructive essays on the causes and effects of female workers’ migration from poor nations to affluent ones.
In their introduction, social commentator Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed, 2001, etc.) and sociologist Hochschild (The Time Bind, 1997) voice the hope that this compilation, to which each has contributed an article, will make visible the female underside of globalization. Third World women leave home by the millions to provide traditionally female services in other countries. There are four major migrational flows: from southeast Asia to the Middle and Far East, from Africa to Europe, from East to West in Europe, and from South to North in the Americas. Most of the essays here are by professors of sociology or anthropology at American universities; the text is rife with such phrases as “intergenerational power dynamics,” “gender roles,” and “spatial dispersal of economic activities.” An exception is novelist Susan Cheever’s piece, which examines on her personal experiences as an employer of nannies. The weightier essays are based on fieldwork, including extensive interviews with migrant domestic workers, and they tackle such issues as the pressures global capitalism puts on women and their families, the ways in which the migration of married women has altered relationships with the husbands and children left behind, and the unbalanced relationships that develop between these workers and their female employers. The most disturbing piece looks at the sex trade in Thailand, where young girls are sold into prostitution and exported to brothels in Japan, Europe, and America. Somewhat out of place here, one essay explores the special case of Vietnam, where a surplus of women has resulted in an exodus of highly educated women who enter arranged marriages with low-wage-earning Vietnamese men living overseas. An annotated list of activist organizations is appended.
For women’s study courses, this look at a heretofore largely unexplored phenomenon is sure to provide controversial material.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-8050-6995-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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